Tuesday, March 17, 2015

I’ve had a Surface 3 Pro now for three months, and I thought I’d share my experiences with it for those interested.

TL;DR version: I hate it BUT I have some very specific use cases I bought it for—and it fails horribly at those. I know others who love their S3s, and there are a few things I do like about the system.

First off: My needs

I bought the Surface to handle loads of content production, authoring, and training when I figured I was heading out as an indie. I didn’t feel I needed a high-horsepower dev system, as that’s not my area.

Specifically, I needed a system that kicked butt at:

Running smaller-sized VMs

Video production

Writing

Portability

Light dev work

I purchased a top-of-the-line i7 Surface 3 Pro with 8GB RAM and the 256 GB SSD. I also sprang for a docking station and a few other odds and ends. Total cost was somewhere around $2,200 I think. (I’m on the road and away from my receipts…)

The Good

There are some things I really enjoy about the S3:

Form factor. Small, very lightweight.

Keyboard. Except for the trackpad (see below), I like the keyboard. I take my MS Ergonomic full-sized board along if I’m doing workshops or sessions where I have to code, but for general authoring and every day usage the keyboard/cover works really well. Great feel, good responsiveness.

Docking / undocking ease. Holy crap. I’ve suffered through decades of Microsoft’s crappy docking mess. The Surface 3 plus Win8.1 makes it a snap, literally. It’s a joy to not have to deal with the drama from way back.

Stylus. Freaking. Awesome. Great feel, extremely precise, great use of buttons on the pen. Kills anything I’ve used on the iPad. Did I mention it’s awesome?

FreshPaint. I badly missed Paper on my iPad. I fell in love with it for doing craay craay slides for demos and presentations. FreshPaint is nearly as good, although there are several icons/buttons that are a total mystery to me. The help for FreshPaint is non-existent, apparently.

The Bad

Here’s where the wheels fall off. Completely.

VM perf over USB3 is unusable. I lose horrific amounts of time trying to run VMs off an external USB3 drive—the same model I’ve had on other systems. It’s horrible. It’s unusable. Which means some of my demos requiring multiple VMs turn into a complete cluster fill-in-the-blank. I had better performance on Firewire 800 on an older MBP.

Power management. I hope the crew that designed power management on the Surface 3 gets infested with bedbugs and fire ants. The power management options are stupid, such that:

I can’t tell the system to stay awake while on battery, but turn on the screen saver. Utter fail when I need to leave the system on for long-running renders and uploads.

Hook up the S3 to my Bluetooth speaker, start music playing, system shuts down and goes to sleep at the hibernate timeout period. Apparently that timeout doesn’t monitor background system activity. Sigh.

Battery life is pathetic, even when I’m not running anything. Apparently there are a bunch of registry hacks and deep system tweaks I can do, but WTF? Seriously? Yes, I know, I’m holding it wrong.

The screen driver is tetchy and causes issues when I’m working in VMs. It also won’t let me properly use Telerik Test Studio on the native S3.

Sound output managment. Every time I plug in headphones I have to reconfigure the default playback device to play over my headphones. Same if I want to use an external Bluetooth speaker W.T.F?!? Crazy usability #EPICFAIL with much profanity.

My device died a horrible death a month after I bought it. Best Buy Geek Squad guy wrote “BIOS screwed up” on the RMA. BTW, this is the second Surface 3 we’ve had die. My wife’s bricked a couple months after we bought hers.

Monday, March 02, 2015

It’s another new chapter for me today: I’m joining Pillar Technology as an Executive Consultant!

I’ve known folks at Pillar for years in many different roles. They were instrumental in helping us sponsor CodeMash, and they’re deeply involved in the Heartland region’s active developer community. When we were struggling during the first CodeMash and knew we were tight on budget, Bob Myers, Pillar’s CEO, personally wrote me an extra check for $2,000 just in case we needed it. I was happy to be able to return it to him, but wow, what a great gesture!

I’ve talked with Pillar several times over the years about coming on board, and I always respected their team, but things weren’t ever quite right for one reason or another. Pillar’s Matt Van Vleet’s probably bought me as many breakfasts as he has key clients…

When I came back on the job market in December Pillar’s Don Abney immediately reached out to me and I had a great chat with him. I was extremely impressed with the extreme focus Pillar’s showing now, and I was very intrigued by the serious change they’re making in the organizations they’re working with.

Today I’m onboarding over at Pillar’s Forge in Columbus, and tonight I’m driving up to Detroit where I’ll start at a huge enterprise helping some of their teams build up their testing and delivery competencies. And automation. Go figure. I’m excited because I get to roll up my sleeves and do work, as well as help coach others along—which always ends up transforming me as much as those others.

About Me

I'm the owner/principal of Guidepost Systems. I help lots of great folks figure out what works and what doesn't in the world of delivering quality software -- something I'm very passionate about. I'm also a Father trying to remain sane while trying to build great software, herd my kids around, fix school lunches and handle the yardwork. (And roast great coffee!)